A Flimsy Post
by Dan Nadel
Monday, April 13, 2009
I’m currently buried in Art Out of Time 2, making it as epic as possible. And I do mean epic. I have one word for you: KONA!!!!
Anyhow, here is some current reading with reviews to come:
-Brush With Passion: The Art and Life of Dave Stevens
-Parasyte vols. 1-3 by Iwaaki
-D.O.A. Comics 1 by Osborne
-A Drifting Life by Tatsumi
-Marvel Masterworks Atlas Era Heroes 3 by Everett and Ayers
-Tarzan: The Jesse Marsh Years Vol. 1
Book of the year for me, in terms of interest, if not quality, so far has been the Stevens book, for reasons I’ll cover in a future post. Is it art I like? Not really. But it’s a fascinating story for reasons that I don’t think the authors really fully understood. I haven’t gotten very far in the Tatsumi yet but I can’t wait.
And, an idle question for you people out there: Is there a Russ Manning estate somewhere? I can’t find much of anything.
Labels: Bill Everett, Dave Stevens, Dick Ayers, Jesse Marsh, kona, Russ Manning, Yoshihiro Tatsumi
my friend has a profound love of Kona – http://bougieman.livejournal.com/231805.html
So, professor, will this be a study in the “frozen moment” school or a treatise on the “retardedness” of the hack-it-out approach?
postscript: It was Newgarden who pointed out to me that although Ogden was a strong adherent to the uptown “frozen moment” school, he often studied on the Bowery at the Elbow Room.
I’m interested to hear what you think of Parasyte. I’ve been reading it for a couple of years, and It’s one of those manga that caters to a mainstream audience, but the plot is just “strange” enough to be interesting. I can’t quite pinpoint why i always come back and get the next issue? Maybe i just like the monsters and Shinichi’s “situation.” The drawing is only interesting in those weirder transformation moments, the rest is typical.
What, the Dave Stevens book or Art Out of Time 2? AOOT2 is strictly a book of excellent comic book stories somewhat in the adventure vein.
Stevens… that book is a surprisingly sad and almost too revealing look at someone who saw himself as a failure. It’s also about L.A. and what that city does to people. Pretty amazing artifact, really.
I suspect that Mark Evanier would be a good guy to ask about Manning. Incidentally, he recently determined that at least some issues of KONA were written by a deceased gentleman by the name of Lionel Ziprin.
I’ve looked at the first 8 issues of KONA so far and I’m fairly certain Lionel Ziprin wrote
KONA NO. 3
Text page: “Physical Forms”
Kona: “Cave of Mutations”
Text/art page: “Creation Combinations”
Not sure if LZ did text/art page: “Observing Nature”
KONA NO. 4
Text/art from inside cover:: “The Ice Age”
Text: “Tunnels”
Anak feature
KONA NO. 5
Everything
KONA NO. 6
Everything
KONA NO. 7
Everything
More soon!